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Challenge
Crystallum explores structure emerging from instability across shifting scales. Translucent crystalline forms fracture and refract across the frame, shifting between states in a continuous, evolving loop. The work focuses on the behaviour of light passing through and around sharp geometric surfaces — how reflections multiply, shadows shift and forms appear to dissolve and reform. Developed as a study in large-format screen content, built entirely using procedural simulation workflows in Houdini and rendered with Redshift.
Approach
Crystallum began as a technical question rather than a visual one: how much structure can a procedural simulation be given before it stops behaving like a simulation.
The forms aren't modelled. They're grown — fracture patterns and refraction solved rather than animated, which means the piece discovers its compositions as much as it designs them. Each sequence is a controlled failure of the system, caught at the point where instability produces something legible.
The audio was composed in close relation to the visual rhythm rather than laid over it: an original choral reinterpretation of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, written against the pacing of each sequence. That closeness is why the voices and the fracturing sit as tightly together as they do.
The piece is built for duration rather than for a cut-down. It has to hold on a screen someone walks past, glances at, and returns to twenty minutes later — still running, still not repeating.
Sequence Stills
CG Work
Motion
Results